


As always, only half-remembered

by Loria_in_eternity



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Humanstuck, Kinda, M/M, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Sadstuck, bittersweet more than sad I guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-01
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2018-01-10 19:31:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1163610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Loria_in_eternity/pseuds/Loria_in_eternity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Sollux Captor, and you don't think this counts as a happy ending. But then again, you suppose, it's as close as you're ever going to get.</p>
<p>This is all wrong, and it's scary and sad and lonely and bittersweet, but you know they all understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As always, only half-remembered

You meet him one windy September day, stupid grey sweater pulled over his ears, cheeks flushed red in the cold, and somehow that just strikes you as a perfect colour for him. _Karkat Vantas_ , you learn his name is. It feels a little odd that you have to ask him for it.

  
You learn about him, as the months pass. He is angry, and passionate, and he is the most compassionate boy you've ever met. He gives money to strangers, beggars on the streets, charities, anyone that needs it, anyone that asks. All the while grumbling, expression never changing from that typical scowl.

  
He is an awful hacker. He tries, but you never cease to be amazed by all the ways he can mess up a simple program. You trade insults, falling into a natural rhythm of banter as easily as breathing. You're a little bit harsher than you think is normal, a little crueller, but that's fine, because so is he.

  
He looks at you oddly when he finds you one evening, after you'd been fixing one of the many computers you have lying around the flat you share. You'd dozed off, sat in the middle of a tangle of wires, and they'd wrapped around you like vines, like a living creature. You feel like you're being assimilated into a computer, and the thought combined with the wires restricting your movement unsettles you deeply for reasons you don't fully understand.

  
He stays with you and helps you until they're all untangled, and then he holds you in his arms for a moment that seems to stretch into eternity- and you know he understands. Which is odd since you don't, not really.

  
He has nightmares. At least you think they're nightmares- that's what he calls them, on the rare occasions he ever talks about them with you. He speaks of far-away places; in his sleep he calls names that you recognise, and only some of them belong to people you know. One day he says it. 'Alternia'. The name strikes you, and the darkest reaches of your soul chime like a bell with recognition. Some part of you echoes the word as you think it, saying _home._

  
He hates wearing the colour red; you laugh at him, but secretly you think it's the one that suits him best. In bed you trace patterns on his skin, and find yourself repeating the same one over and over- Cancer, his star sign. He decides to get it tattooed eventually, and he wants it in grey. You nag him until he agrees to make it red, although neither of you are sure why the colour is so important. It just is.

  
The sight of his blood will sometimes make him freeze up in horror. You'd call it a phobia, but it doesn't seem quite right to you. He looks at cuts and bruises on his skin with an odd expression, something like disgust, something like grief. And, of course, underlain with the confusion that fits both of your faces so familiarly. The feeling that comes with the strange sense of thinking thoughts you don't know the meaning or cause of, feeling somehow like a stranger in your own head.

  
When you read stories with telekinesis in, you imagine red and blue sparks and the sensation of moving something without touching it. It feels so familiar, feels like something you could do if you could only remember how. You know, however, that you never could. Like an angel with its wings cut off; trying to remember how to fly is pointless when the part of you that could is missing. _This is wrong_ , you think, as always. _I want to go back._

  
_Where to?_ , you wonder, and the part of you that knows the answer is locked away, as always.

  
One day, as you are sipping idly at a drink at the local coffee-shop, you see an idiot in a stupid hipster scarf and glasses, and you're struck with a strange sense of emptiness, like you've been ripped in two. The image isn't as amusing as it'd usually be. You feel hollow, and as he turns around and sees you, you think you can spot the same hollowness settle into his eyes.

  
When he talks, he has the most horrendous accent. At the first sound of his voice, the image of him in front of you is neatly overlaid by another face that's oh so very different, but still his. He sits beside you and orders you a coffee, and he guesses your preference on the first try. That doesn't surprise either of you as much as it maybe should. You're kinda used to the sensation by now.

  
He and Karkat make friends quickly. They gossip and watch shitty movies together, and when you see them stretched out on the sofa, it looks so very right and yet so very wrong. It isn't how it should be, but at the same time it's exactly right.

  
You don't worry much about the conflicting sentiments. You've always had a thing for duality.

  
You aren't really sure how long 'always' is, anymore.

  
You go star-gazing with Aradia and Feferi, and you point out the star signs together. Your chest aches, and you see the same quiet melancholy in them when you look at their faces. Aradia gets out her music boxes 'to pass the time' and you all laugh even though you don't really know why it's funny.

  
Sometimes you look at the others and you feel like you're seeing two overlapping images, and sometimes you look and you're seeing grey skin and candy-corn horns and it should be so wrong but it feels so right.

  
You are lying in bed with Karkat one night, holding him as he blindly fumbles his way back to reality after another dream. He looks at you with an unreadable expression, and he says _it's all wrong, Sollux, it's all different and we're different and I want it to be the way it was!_ and you reply _I know, KK, I know. I'm thorry._ even though you don't know, you don't know one bit; you don't know what the words mean or why you say them but it's long ceased to even scare you. He calls you stupid and insults you with swear words that aren't real and he can't provide definitions for, and then he says you have nothing to be sorry for and holds you desperately tight, as if to ward off the painfully familiar dreams.

  
You fall asleep with an ache in your chest, tears in your eyes, and a smile on your face.

**Author's Note:**

> I know I said I'd write some fluff... but, well, I guess I lied? oops.  
> I hope this turned out alright! I just though that an ending where no-one fully remembers isn't as happy as it always seems to be written! So I thought I'd write it a little bittersweet.  
> Thanks for reading! Please leave me some feedback if you can! :)


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